What Do You Expect from God?

How many times have we sat in a church service or in front of a television/computer screen and heard a preacher talking about everything that God is going to protect us from? Too many times preachers and evangelists talk about all the good God will bring us here on Earth. We all hear about everything good God is going to do for us, but what does it actually mean that He is going to protect us? Does it mean that he is going to keep us safe, keep our job, (I know no one really wants to hear this but...) keep our family safe? Preachers who are trying to convert the lost into Christianity often paint a picture of a perfect life with Christ; a life where everything that you ever wanted becomes yours. I don’t want to name any pastors specifically but one televangelist in particular preaches that if you accept God into your life all of your worries will be over. He also says that anything you ask for will be given to you. Have we ever asked for something from God and we haven’t received it? I have. I know right now in this post it seems like I am trying to say that God isn’t who you think He is or that He simply is not going to help us out. I guess in a way you could say that I may be telling you God can possibly be different from what you know and expect of him. I have been burdened to get this message out and I hope to actually give this message to the next place God allows me to speak. This is a message that I think everyone, especially teenagers who are facing tough decisions right now and are facing a hard time, should hear (or in this particular case, read). Too often we get discouraged because we think that God is not here for us because bad things keep happening to us. Maybe this post is for you!

            First I am going to start off by saying that we need to be fully satisfied with God. And you may be thinking, “I am totally satisfied with Him.” For us to be fully satisfied with God we have to understand that He is in control. He is sovereign; He rules the entire universe including the heavens! To be fully satisfied with Him we also have to realize that bad things are going to happen to us! He never promised us that everything was going to be great all of the time. Too many times we think since we are children of God’s we think we are not subject to hurt and pain. Evangelists have fooled us and now we expect to live a perfect painless life. I think one reason many people “lose their faith” and “fall away from God” is because of the deceit that we have been fed by the ones that teach us. One thing evangelists have right is that God wants us to be happy, and I only agree with this statement partially. I believe He wants us to be happy but not the happy that worldly pleasures bring. We should be happy because of the joy of knowing that nothing here on earth matters besides our relationship with Him and furthering His kingdom.

            Why do you think that God wouldn’t want us to be happy because of the things here on Earth? I believe that is because we know that we cannot take anything from this world when we die. Think about it for a second. You have died and are laying in your casket in a church somewhere with a preacher standing over you speaking to your loved ones. What is in your casket? You! You and maybe some nice clothes your family wanted to be buried with and so that they can remember you that way, and even the clothes don’t matter at all! When you leave this world it is going to be just your soul. Your soul does not carry bags; you don’t leave with a moving truck. Once your life here is done that is it. So what really matters? “Store your treasures in heaven, where moths and rust cannot destroy, and thieves do not break in and steal.” That verse is Matthew 6:20. The verse is pretty self explanatory. Store your treasures in heaven because things here on earth come and go. The Lord gives and He takes away. It is all His anyway. Think of the story of Job. It is simply too long to explain the whole thing but to make it short it is a story of Job and his faithfulness to God. God allows Satan to tempt Job to sin and curse God by taking away everything that he had, from his family to his livestock to his health. Job never sinned by cursing God for taking the things away from him because Job knew that it was all God’s to begin with; actually, he praised God still! He knew that those things didn’t matter. Only his faithfulness to God did. If we could all be like Job we could see things in a completely different perspective.

            So why shouldn’t we worry about tomorrow? Why should we not care about what we have here on earth? Its because God gives us the joy of knowing He has us in his hand. If He has us in His hand then why do we still hurt, why do we still lose things that we hold dear to us? Because God saved us. He saved us from the fear of a spiritual death. This means that because we have faith in Him we are not subject to destruction, not worldly destruction, unworldly destruction. He is keeping us from going to a very real place called Hell. God sent His only perfect son to die a brutal death so that our sins could be paid for all so that we could have eternal life by just believing in his death and ressurection. What more should we have to worry about? People who are of this world hold their possessions very close to their heart. They worship their possessions. Everything they do has to do with money and making themselves happy. It is sad really that people have to hold things like this so dear, but that is literally all they have. The seek happiness in worldly pleasures and items because they don’t have anything else. We, as followers of God, should not be like this. I am not saying it is wrong to own nice things and to do things that make us happy because it is not. What is wrong is letting those things control our lives and if that happens we lose our sight of God and when we lose our happiness and our possessions we turn to God and ask, “why?” “Why would you do this to me God?” Sometimes if we lose things dear to us it is simply a test of our faith; god can be asking you, “what is more important, Me or your junk?” God will be around a whole lot longer than anything we can buy.

            Many times our lives become filled with hurt and sadness. We lose our boyfriend/girlfriend, job, house, car, friends, parents, children, etc. When things such as these happen we get angry at God or either we lose our faith all together because we feel He is not with us anymore. We just simply have to remember: He gives us things and He takes them away all for a reason. This reason may or may not be known to us, but nonetheless they were not really ours to begin with. Everything we have has been given to us through His gracious hands. If you are reading this I am willing to bet that you are far more fortunate than others on this planet. We have to realize that our possessions should not be our number one love in life. Until we understand that God is keeping us from unworldly destruction rather than worldly destruction we will continually be mad at God for taking the things he has given us away. I thank God for every minute I get to spend with the things He has given me because if He decides it is time for them to go they will go and I just have to be happy for the time He allowed me to spend with it. As hard as it is dealing with losing something that you love you have to remember that God truly is in control and He knows that He is doing, even when it looks like He doesn’t. Until next time, remember that our God reigns!

Take My Life

It has been way too long since my last post and for those of you who follow me semi regularly I am sorry. I have been busy doing a whole lot of nothing since I have been home for Christmas break. I have had plenty of good ideas for posts but in the moment haven’t felt as strongly as I do about this one coming up. Like always I will give you a little bit of background to where this post is actually coming from. I just got back from hanging out with my friend at work. He works the night shift at a hotel so we watch tv shows and movies for most of the night until its time for me to go home to bed. Tonight when I got home I lie down in my bed and prayed. Right now in my life I have lots going on mainly inside my head so the average person would not even know it. Pretty much decisions. Many, many decisions I need to make and as I prayed tonight I asked God to take care of them for me. As I was praying a song popped into my head. “take my life and let it be, all for You and for Your glory. Take my life and let it be Yours.” The song actually became my prayer. As I literally sang to God my prayer in bed I began thinking about the song.  Have we ever really thought about the words to this song? I know you are probably sitting there thinking, “well duhhh, its pretty self explanatory!” Oh is it? Many of the times I have sang this song has been at a camp towards the end of the worship section of the service and the song has been carefully placed to get the most affect. We have all sang the song at the top of our lungs, eyes closed, arms held high, possibly even tearing up a bit because of the magnitude of the words we are singing. As I think about all of the times I have sang those words I thought, “why have I always had to come back and make this my prayer over and over again?” Making this a daily prayer can never be a bad thing, if we truly mean it. This post is my break down of this simple yet powerful chorus.

            Lets start with the first word, take. Do we actually know what take means? If not, I Googled it for you. Many definitions came up for the word take. The first definition is to carry out, as in take action. Since the pronoun in the chorus is capitalized, we can assume God will be doing the taking. Another definition is lead. God will be doing the leading. “To get into ones hands” is the next definition. God will be putting us in His hands. In the sense the word “take” is used here is the same as to “take a cookie.” If you take a cookie you are taking the cookie from where it was to wherever you are now. Incase this doesn’t make sense yet please stay with me.

            The next words in the chorus are “my life.” Unlike “take” this can only mean one thing. Your life is your life. Not your parents, neighbor, friends, relatives, teacher, etc. you are the one who is in control of your life. No one else controls it (not saying that you shouldn’t respect/obey your parents, elders and so on). Lets put “take” and “my life” together. Take my life = carry out my life, lead my life, pick up my life. Just in this first part of the chorus you are already telling God to do something very, very big. To TAKE YOUR LIFE. Taking of lives can mean many different things and for most people it usually just means to kill/end a life. If you think about it like I do, it actually makes more sense than any other way I could explain it. “God take my life, end the life I have now” is what you are saying so far. Hope you are still with me because it will become clearer very soon.

            “And let it be” is the next part of this chorus. I don’t want to insult your intelligence but just to be clear we are going to go over what each of these words mean. “let” means to allow something to happen. “it” is referring to YOUR life. “be” is one of those words you know what it meand but you probably couild not give a straight definition for if you had to so I googled it as well. “Be”, by definition, means: to have the quality of being, to be identical to. Can I say WOW!?! Lets put all of this together. “and let it be”- allow my life to have the quality of being…/allow my life to be identical to.... . if we put everything we have learned together we get. God put my life in your hand, allow it to be…/God carry out my life so it can be identical to… . Still following?

            Next we come to “all for You and for Your glory.” Do we all know what “all” means? Google says “all” means: completely given to or absorbed by. So completely given to or absorbed by what? That brings us around to the “for You and for Your glory” part. Completely given to or absorbed by God, for His glory; not our glory but His. What does glory mean? My trusty google says glory means: a state of high honor. So: completely given to God for Him and for His high honor. Lets put it all together yet again. God allow MY life to be for YOU. Let My life bring YOU glory. Take my life and let it be Yours.

            For many of you scholars out there this has probably been the most redundant thing you have ever read. You are thinking, “ yes, yes I knew exactly what that meant, I didn’t need to waste my time reading this!”  Well I am not quite done. In order for God to take our lives we have to surrender it to Him. In other words, in order for him to pick us up like a cookie and take us somewhere else we have to let him end the one we are living in right now. This is a chorus of salvation that we as Christians or non Christians can sing to Him anytime we feel we are not in the right place. To live our lives we have got to lose the one we are living in now. We can sing this chorus everyday for the rest of our lives but until we truly mean it we won’t get anywhere. We have to lose/end our life-it has to be taken from us (by God), we have to allow God to have His way with our lives so that we can actually live for His glory and to bring great honor to His name. So many times we have stood in a crowded worship room, hands held high, tears running down our faces, screaming at the top of our lungs for God to come take our lives and let them be His.

            For so long I sang this song. I always wanted Him to take control of my life and to make my life about Him and less about me. Until tonight I didn’t put 2 and 2 together; that I had to actually tell Him to take it but I also had to ALLOW Him to take it. He can do it alone, but He is not going to. We have to put forth the effort to change our lives and to make Him first before he will give us a hand with it. Think of it like this. Your teacher at school isn’t just going to give you the answer to that hard math problem before you try to figure it out. The only difference is that we have God to help us. And if we try hard enough he is going to help us through to where He wants us to be in our lives. We have to remember one thing: as we sing this prayer it will mean that He can and will take our life, it will no longer be our life but His, and it will be about His glory and not our own. Once we understand this we can finally allow Him to have our lives and actually surrender to His will for our lives. It is such a deep thing when you think about it that when we mean it we are actually telling God that we have full confidence in Him to take our lives and to mold them into what He wants and that whatever we want does not matter.

            Like always I hope I didn’t lose anyone along the way and if I did drop me a line on here or facebook or wherever and we can discuss this further. I also hope I was not too redundant because a certain someone told me I repeat myself a lot in these, so if I did I apologize. Until next time, God bless you